Britain: Stephen Fry has denounced the government’s failure to act over the mass surveillance programme revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, labelling its behaviour as “squalid and rancid”. Opening a day of debate to galvanise action against spying by the British and US intelligence agencies, Fry said that exploiting the fear of terrorism is a “duplicitous and deeply wrong means of excusing something as base as spying on the citizens of your own country”: here.

Though the NSA says its mass surveillance of Americans targets only “terrorists,” the spying may turn up evidence of other illegal acts that can get passed on to law enforcement which hides the secret source through a ruse called “parallel construction,” writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern: here.